Morpholo tiles were designed by Thieri Foulc in 1985, they are a combination of square tiles which can be arranged in different ways, as a game or a piece of art. There are 240 tiles, containing black and white shapes; the rule of the game is to match the black edges with black, and white edges against white, creating many different combinations. In order to create these tiles, a code in generated using a mathematical formula. Below is an example of one of the combinations.
Generation of the material:
Take a square. Each side may be divided if half, and each half side (or half edge) may be designated black or white. For each side, there are four possible structures: white and white, white and black, black and white or black and black. For the square, with its four sides, there are therefore 256 possible structures. The tiles may be numbered according to the order of their generation:
The workshop today focused on visual games within creative practice, helping us explore Adobe Illustrator and editing typography within chosen fonts. Basic pen tool skills in relation to drawing/rendering and the manipulation of typographic letter forms were also a focus. Communication through art and how artists have re-imaginsed objects to communicate something completely different was our aim this afternoon. The independent learning task was to produce a collection of Morpholo tiles, we created a series of thumbnail drawings of potential tile designs using the code generator. The code generator worked when we chose a number from the given spreadsheet, and entered it online, giving us the tile combination we were to produce. These were made up of black rectangles around the edges or the square tiles. Unfortunately I didn't scan this piece of work to display.
The next step of today's workshop involved bringing type into our work. We looked into different fonts, online and in the computers font book, and picked a few that we found visually interesting. Picking out small aspects from the letters, we were able to place these into our generated Morpholo tiles, lining up the elements from the type, to match the sides touched by the black rectangles. Before beginning the process digitally, I sketched a few designs on paper that I could then bring into illustrator. 'Water Park was my chosen font, it was contemporary, made up of curved edges and white circles inside the letters. I thought it was interesting and quite detailed, so I took some of the letters, and placed them into illustrator on my square tile document, just how I planned to use them in my sketches. These examples below are my final outcomes, I found it hard to line them up exactly, but in the end I managed to correctly adjust them to touch the right edges. I enjoyed this session as I love working with typography, and I have been able to use illustrator for two years, so I had a great understanding of how to use to pen tool to adjust my lines.
